That Escalated Quickly
I was working at a camp for children with various psychological disorders, most with some sort of behavioral concerns. The girl I was paired with had a history of aggressive and violent tendencies. We went the whole day without any problems.
That was, until we were doing some group physical activity to wind down and focus before leaving for the day. She didn’t like that this meant no longer playing with a certain toy, so she took off her shoe and threw it at the little boy in front of her.
He had autism and immediately started crying and screaming. While someone helped him, I turned to the girl to explain to her that what she did was wrong. As I turned towards her, she punched me square in the face, then grabbed a hold of my hair.
She managed to pull out a good chunk. I’m about 5’1 and this girl was maybe one or two inches shorter than me and had about 20 pounds on me, despite being nine years old. Trying to get a safe physical restraint was difficult and comical to say the least.
Finally, I got some help from other staff and we were able to calm her down after about 15 minutes. The kicker was when we told her mom what happened, she basically dismissed the entire thing and laughed about it.
SO frustrating because you just know this kind of thing is reinforced at home as there is no punishment. The girl then starts hitting her mom, who grabs and holds down her arms.
The little girl laughs, looks at me and the other staff member, and says, “Ugh a little help over here?! Are you going to let her do this to me? She’s hurting my arm.”
I went home and did this weird laugh/cry for a few hours after that. Luckily you learn pretty quickly not to take things personally and move on, so things were back to normal the next day.
I do occasionally look back at that day just baffled at how quickly that whole situation escalated. Story credit: Reddit / sike_ology